Cinema 2011 #50: Julia's Eyes

Spain – the land of sun, sangria and hair-raising screams. At least that’s what the country’s film directors would have you believe based on the successive supply of high-concept horrors to hit our screens care of the Costa del Sol. There have been gothic fantasies with unpleasant goats, documentaries of the undead with a recording SteadiCam, and now even Almodovar, Spanish cinema’s auteur, is jumping out of his skin to get in on the blood-curdling action. Julia’s Eyes, from writer-director Guillem Morales, is the latest addition to the Iberian nasties and reunites him with Guillermo del Toro, on producing duty, and star Belén Rueda, who’d previously cowered behind Morales’ castanets in 2007’s The Orphanage.

Rueda is Julia, an astronomer suffering from a degenerative disease slowly robbing her of her sight. When her equally plighted twin Sara takes her own life, Julia begins to suspect foul play and investigates her sister’s romance with a man nobody can seem to recall. Things take a distinct turn for the sinister and it’s not long before Julia undergoes an experimental transplant surgery to restore her eyesight. Cared for by nurse Iván in her sister’s gloomy home, Julia will have to hone her remaining senses to figure out just what’s going bump in the night.

To explain more would be to give away the numerous twists in this original, if sadly overcooked, horror, where the execution is a lot smarter than the story. Morales knows how to frame a horror, muted greys and creeping shadows, and has followed up his genuinely creepy Orphange with a film of clever and unsettling tricks. For example, when Julia’s in recovery, her peepers wrapped up and obscuring her vision, we never see the faces of any other characters in the frame, their heads cut off above the neck or facing the opposite direction. It’s devilishly simple, but brilliantly effective when it comes to figuring out if these faceless people are friend or foe, and makes you empathise immediately with Julia’s disorienting loss of sight.

 But Morales’ script overplays its hand, loading every scene with a new twist and turn to sidestep what you think you know, and some eleventh hour cheesiness that just doesn’t sit right with the rest of the film. Add to this a number of niggling questions (why would the hospital let a temporarily blinded patient live alone in an unfamiliar house?) and Julia’s Eyes begin to lose their sparkle.

3 Likes.